Character counter
Paste or type to count characters with and without spaces, and check your text against common length limits.
Runs entirely in your browser
- Characters
- 0
- Without spaces
- 0
- Letters
- 0
- Digits
- 0
- Spaces
- 0
- Words
- 0
- Lines
- 0
- Code points
- 0
- UTF-8 bytes
- 0
Length limits
| Where | Limit | Used | Left |
|---|
The X and SMS rows follow those systems' own counting rules; the other rows count characters as shown above. Limits are guides: platforms change them and some measure width on screen rather than characters.
Text up to about 5 MB. Counts update as you type; very long text updates a moment after you stop typing.
How to count characters
- Type or paste your text into the box, or open a .txt file.
- Read the counts beside it: characters with and without spaces, letters, words, lines and bytes.
- Check the Length limits table to see how much room is left for an X post, a text message, a title tag or a meta description.
Counting characters the way the receiving system does
"Character" means different things to different software. A person sees one character in "é" or in a flag emoji, but a computer may store either as two or more pieces. This counter shows the count you see (Characters), the lower-level count of Unicode code points, and the number of bytes the text takes up in UTF-8, the encoding most websites and databases use. When a form says "maximum 255 characters", it is usually counting one of these, and the difference matters only for emoji, accents stored as separate marks and non-Latin scripts.
The length limits table compares your text with places where length is often capped. Each row shows what is used and what is left; a row over its limit shows how many characters to cut. Text messages are counted with the GSM rules phones use, so one emoji can switch the whole message to the shorter Unicode limit.
Everything is counted in your browser as you type. The text is not uploaded or stored.
Tips
- Need words, sentences, reading time and keyword density instead? Use the Word counter.
- Text pasted from a PDF full of line breaks? Clean it with Remove line breaks before counting.
- Turning a title into a web address? The Slug generator makes a clean URL slug.
Questions
What counts as one character?
One character is what you see as a single symbol, even when the computer stores it as several pieces. An emoji such as a family or a flag, or a letter with a separately stored accent, counts as one character. The browser's own text segmentation decides where each character starts and ends. The Code points figure shows the lower-level count, where those combined symbols count as two or more.
Why do other sites give a different count?
Each system counts its own way. Some count code points or UTF-16 units instead of visible characters, so an emoji may count as 2 or more there. Some count a Windows line break as two characters. The figures here tell you which unit each one uses, so you can match the count the receiving system expects.
How does the X (Twitter) count work?
The 280 limit on X is weighted: most Latin letters, digits and punctuation count as 1, while Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters and emoji count as 2, and any web link counts as 23 whatever its length. This tool applies those rules, but X can change them and treats some cases differently, so treat the result as a close estimate and check before posting.
How is the SMS count worked out?
A text message that uses only the standard GSM character set fits 160 characters; a few symbols such as € [ ] { } count as two. If the message contains any other character, such as an emoji or many accented letters, the whole message is sent as Unicode and the limit drops to 70. Longer messages are split into parts of 153 (or 67 for Unicode) characters each, which is what the message count shows. Some phones and carriers convert or count characters differently.
How long should a title tag or meta description be?
Search engines cut off titles and descriptions by their width on screen rather than a fixed number of characters. As a rough guide, titles of up to about 60 characters and descriptions of about 155 to 160 characters usually show in full. Wide letters such as W and M use up the space faster than narrow ones.
Is my text uploaded?
No. The counting runs in your browser, and the text is not uploaded or stored. Closing the tab clears it.